Alarm in turn changed to a gasp of astonishment as Eleanor recognised the man coming towards her. He was William the Marshal – not William battle-scarred and grizzled as he had been at the time of Richard’s death but William in his prime, William with his sparkling eyes, William with his curly hair and the smile that warmed her heart. What she had thought a weapon was the camera and flash gun in his hands.
With the realisation that there were no barriers to divide her as queen from him as commoner in this new life, where they were free to slake the passion they both had felt, a spasm of desire seized Eleanor.
‘Nox mirabilis est!’ She ran forward and reached out to him with both arms. ‘Guilelmus, equitis optimus …’
‘O best of knights,’ she sobbed, overcome with emotion surging within her breast and belly as love and lust intermingled in a great swirl of desire. ‘Have you come to serve and love me once again with your unbounded devotion? Oh, William, truly this is a wondrous night!’
‘Jay?’ Merlin stopped two paces from her and repeated, ‘Jay?’
The stream of Latin told him that although he was looking at Jay’s body, it was inhabited by Eleanor’s mind. He felt himself seized in an embrace. His arms went automatically around the body he knew. This woman smelt the same and felt the same and the voice was the voice he loved, breathing words he could not understand in his ear. He felt Eleanor sobbing and quivering with desire, and found himself returning the fevered kisses of the woman in his arms as her hands clung to him. Behind her in the darkness came the chink chink chink of hammer and chisel.
Breathless, Eleanor pulled away to look upon Merlin’s face and said in a clear voice, ‘Beautiful!’
It was a word she had learned that afternoon from one of the dancers in the disco bar.
‘Jay?’ A smile of tremendous relief spread over Merlin’s face. ‘Oh my God, I love you. I thought …’
The heavy silencer of the Uzi caught him behind the left ear and he fell to the ground at Eleanor’s feet, stunned. She saw, standing where Merlin had been, a smaller, thin man holding what was obviously some kind of weapon pointed straight at her. Beside him stood a taller man. Their two faces together made that of Yussef el-Kebir.
The sweet blend of success and love curdled in her mouth. Of course, she thought, it stands to reason that Yussef would not have done everything for me and nothing for himself!
‘Get inside, you whore!’ snarled Kassim. If the words meant nothing to Eleanor, the gesture of the weapon was plain. She turned to walk into the caldarium, angry at herself for leaving Yussef’s interest out of the equation. At the entrance she asked a question in Latin but received only an incomprehensible answer in English and a shove from the Uzi’s silencer that sent her sprawling onto the mosaic floor.
Kreuz’s body was half in and half out of the hole he had made in the false wall, a pile of golden objects beside him. On hearing the noise, he wriggled back into the main chamber and turned with a huge golden chalice gleaming in one hand and a solid gold statuette in the other. His eyes blinked, taking in the sight of Eleanor getting to her feet still threatened by Kassim’s gun, while in the entrance to the caldarium Leila and Salem carried a groaning, semi-conscious Merlin between them.
‘These men,’ explained Eleanor in Latin, ‘are the sons of Yussef el-Kebir.’
‘Shut up!’ snarled Kassim. ‘Against the wall. Put your hands on your head!’ He menaced her with the gun. When she did not comply, his finger tightened on the trigger. He licked his lips. It was going to be a pleasure to execute this shameless whore whose dress revealed the swell of her breasts. In his nostrils, she stank of sex.
‘No!’ cried Kreuz. ‘Don’t shoot! She doesn’t understand English.’
In his anguish at the thought that Eleanor might be killed before she had given him the information he needed for his own reincarnation, he rose and lurched off-
balance towards Kassim, holding the golden objects before him.
The silencer swallowed most of the noise of the gun, turning it into the coughing of some subterranean beast. The three impacting bullets lifted Kreuz bodily and hurled him back against the wall above the hole in which gleamed the golden hoard of Châlus. Like Richard, struck by the crossbow bolt eight hundred years before, his last thought was that it was all a mistake. The body slumped to the ground on the heap of gold. In the eerie silence, the chalice and statuette fell from his lifeless hands and rolled into a depression where the mosaic floor had subsided in the centre of the caldarium.
Merlin staggered to his feet as Kassim walked across the chamber and kicked Kreuz’s body to make sure it was dead. Then he turned back to Eleanor. She had not seen exactly how the weapon in his hand worked but she had seen many other amazing machines that day and accepted that the man threatening her now intended to kill her too. There was no language in which she could bargain with him or plead for her life so she slipped the dress off one shoulder, revealing her breasts in the hope of distracting him.
A wrong move, she thought, seeing his tongue lick dry lips. Kassim gripped the Uzi tighter to control the recoil and began slowly to squeeze the trigger. Eleanor’s eyes watched the finger take up the first pressure. Kassim felt a surge of almost sexual pleasure. He liked to see a victim watch his finger squeeze the trigger, especially this bitch on heat.
‘Yussef el-Kebir servus meus erat. Filii ejus estis.’ The rapid Latin meant nothing to Kassim except for the name of his ancestor. His finger relaxed the pressure as he half-turned to Salem. Because his victim was only a woman he felt no need to be on his guard.
‘What does the whore say about Yussef el-Kebir?’ he asked. ‘Do you understand?’
Leila had picked up Merlin’s flash gun when she helped Salem lift him off the ground. She slipped it now into Merlin’s hand. He hit the Test button as Kassim turned towards them. The flash blinded Kassim and everyone in the chamber except Eleanor who was sheltered from it by Kassim’s body. In one swift movement she grabbed the heavy chalice at her feet and hit the armed man a vicious blow on the side of the head.
Kassim was sufficiently stunned to release his grip on the Uzi momentarily. Eleanor dropped the chalice, grabbed the weapon out of his hands and stepped back. In the first lesson in swordsmanship that Richard had ever given her, the golden rule had been: Always give yourself room to manoeuvre. Because the unfamiliar weapon in her hands so resembled a lopsided crossbow, Eleanor placed the stock against her right shoulder and found the trigger, in the same place on a crossbow, with her right index finger. As Richard had showed her how to do, she sighted along the barrel and squeezed.
Kassim’s head exploded in a spray of pink foam as the stream of 9 mm. dum-dummed slugs atomised flesh and blood and bone and brain. If Eleanor’s fingers had released the trigger after the first few rounds, she might have been safe. Instead, ignorant of the workings of the automatic firing mechanism which uses the hot gas from one charge to feed the next round into the chamber and fire it, she kept the trigger depressed.
The Uzi spat round after round into thin air where Kassim’s face had been. It was the firing of the last bullet in the magazine which brought the temperature in the breech to the critical level at which this gun had been designed to explode.
Silenced Uzis were so obviously terrorist weapons that the whole consignment sold to Ghaddafy’s front man had been clandestinely replaced in the Rotterdam warehouse by a team of Mossad burglars. The substitute guns were identical except for a network of hairline fractures that crisscrossed the roof of the breech. The deliberate defect was known in the arms trade as spiking. If Eleanor had been holding the weapon in the conventional position at waist level the small fireball of super-heated gas that emerged from the fractured breech would have blown her face away. As it was, most of the heat energy blasted harmlessly at the roof of the chamber but more than enough had curled briefly around her face and hair.
‘Non video!’ she screamed, dropping the now useless gun.
Her ears, deafened by the blast
, heard nothing. She raised her hands to her face and felt blisters growing on the scorched skin. The flesh of the long fingers, of which she had been so proud, had peeled off and was hanging in strips like the chest of Pierre Basile.
A wordless howl of anguish escaped her burnt lips. She envisaged herself blind and burnt hideous into the bargain. No man would ever look at her now, no lover desire this body she had acquired at such cost! Eleanor’s plans crumbled around her and in a second that would last for all eternity she wished to be dead again.
Chapter 12
‘I love you, Jay!’
Somewhere in the darkness a bird cried. Jay struggled to put an image to the faintest of sounds. It was like fighting a general anaesthetic. She was tempted to stay a part of the cloying nothingness, an unthinking fragment of dust in interstellar space. But her mind, awoken by the faint echo of the bird’s cry, refused to let go of the sound. Not any bird this, but one she knew. The accelerando trill at the end of the Slow Movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony was the call of the nightingale. But this was top F slurred to D, almost like a cat mewing. No, a seagull! And not just any gull: a seagull circling in the north-east gale.
Where? Jay forced herself to remember. It was above the storm-lashed promenade at Herne Bay after …
The gull cried again, louder this time. She strained to hear it against the solar wind and fingered the notes in her mind: an F quaver slurring to a D minim. Mer-lin. Mer-lin. And again: Mer-lin.
Oh God, I love you, Merlin. Why did I never tell you? Why did I let Eleanor drive us apart? Why couldn’t I see until it was too late what she was doing to us both?
There was a flash of light in the void as a supernova was born. A flash of light and then again the blackness of infinity and its twin, eternity. The rushing solar wind buffeted dust molecules and whole planets in its path. Again the seagull cried, but this time much closer and a voice said urgently: ‘Jay!’
It was Merlin’s voice: ‘Jay, can you hear me? Hang in there, will you? Don’t give up. I love you, Jay.’ A man’s arm was around her shoulder. Jay knew it was his. She was lying on something soft but firm, being jerked from side to side. She could hear small whimpering cries forced out of her body by each movement, through lips that would hardly open. Merlin, she sensed, was bracing her and trying to spare her the worst of the jerking.
Her senses were coming back one by one. Hearing had been the first. In the background was the low-frequency growl of a diesel engine in bottom gear. Behind that, another voice was talking, distorted by the small speaker in the vehicle. A man answering in French: something about the number of minutes before they arrived at the hospital.
Sight? There was nothing but blackness still.
Smell? A strange mixture of odours in her nostrils: disinfectant, rubber and burnt meat. Touch? She could not move her hands. They hurt but she could not feel anything with them. Yet there was some feeling. Her body was being shaken, forcing more groans out of her. There were straps around her legs and arms holding her on the firm narrow bed. Not a bed, a stretcher. In an ambulance, of course. And such pain on the skin of her face that she wanted to scream.
‘Merlin?’ Jay tried to lift a hand and touch him, to know that he was near. But her hands were wrapped in masses of something soft and the straps stopped any movement of her arms.
‘Merlin?’ She wanted to speak louder but the pain of opening her lips wide was too much.
‘I’m here.’ She felt the pressure of his arm cushioning her head. His other hand squeezed her biceps.
‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna be okay.’
The rocking motion stopped as the ambulance turned onto the proper road surface and picked up speed. A siren started wailing on the roof and another on the police car ahead.
‘I must know,’ Jay whispered. ‘What’s happened to me? Why can’t I see anything or talk properly?’
‘You’ve been burnt,’ he said.
‘My face?’
He hesitated. ‘Yeah.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘Pretty bad.’
That means very bad, she thought. ‘Am I going to die?’
He laughed a low throaty chuckle of relief. ‘I can tell you, you are not going to die.’
‘I can’t open my eyes. I can hardly open my mouth.’
‘Don’t try,’ he advised. ‘You’re covered in gauze and some kind of foam to stop fluid loss through the burnt tissue.’
Jay felt very calm. She was in an ambulance with Merlin looking after her. Her face was burnt, but perhaps that wasn’t the worst news. ‘Merlin,’ she panicked. ‘My hands, are they burnt too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh God, will I ever be able to play again?’
‘A gun blew up,’ he explained.
‘I was holding a gun?’
‘Eleanor was. But that’s all over.’
It was so tempting to drift into unconsciousness in order to escape the pain, but she refused to return to the comforting blackness. ‘Talk to me, Merlin,’ she whispered. ‘Please. You’ve seen men injured like I am now. Haven’t you?’
‘Too many times.’
‘And do they get better?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘I mean, are they scarred for life?’
He cleared his throat. ‘It depends how quickly they get to the right surgeon, honey. As soon as we arrive at the local hospital I’m gonna be on the telephone. I want you in the Val de Grâce today.’
The valley of grace? she wondered. It sounded so medieval.
He answered the unspoken question. ‘It’s the biggest military hospital in France, and the best place for firearms injuries. And if they can’t make you look beautiful again there, I’ll have you on an Air Force plane to Walter Reed in Washington. They have the best plastic surgeons in the world in that place and I’ve got all the connections with the military to get you in there, you’ll see.’
He carried on talking to give her something on which to focus as the pain ebbed and flowed, and to stop her sliding into shock.
Jay clung to Merlin’s whispers. At the hospital she heard the ambulance doors being thrown open. Merlin’s arm was pulled out from under her shoulders.
‘Merlin!’ She cried in the sightless blackness. ‘Don’t leave me!’
His voice was close to her ear as the stretcher was lifted. His hand squeezed her shoulder.
‘I won’t,’ she heard him say. ‘Never again, I promise.’
Chapter 13
Leila watched Salem strike blow after blow with the jagged stone until the surface of the tile was pitted in so many places that the writing was illegible. The staccato noises were almost drowned by the noise of a concrete mixer not far away where one of the other houses in Tel el-Sultan was being rebuilt.
It had been an impulse, completely unthought-out, that made her grab an armful of the golden artefacts and stuff them under the back seat of her beat-up little car before the gendarmes arrived. The rusty old deux chevaux had actually been driven for her through the police cordon by one of them.
When the questioning was over and Salem released for lack of any evidence to connect him with the faceless body with its false identification papers, Leila had accompanied him to the Swiss border. She had meant to hand him his share of the treasure of Châlus as a going-away present. But saying goodbye, he had looked so lost and helpless, she felt she had to look after him for a while.
So she had driven the gold into Switzerland among a pile of canvases in the back of her car and helped Salem find a bank in Basel where his treasure would be safe. And after that she had stayed on because Salem was too broken by Kassim’s death on top of all the others to cope with even the simplest task like finding food or a hotel room for himself. Her own patience had surprised Leila. She had never wanted to look after a man before, certainly not one as snarled up as Salem then was. During her marriage she had gone through the motions of what other wives did but without feeling any involvement. This was different.
When she had tried to draw Salem out about his plans, he had talked vaguely of settling in America or Argentina where he had cousins. The gold sitting in the safety deposit box would more than finance that. Leila had listened to his words and the spaces between the words, understanding that Salem did not really want to go anywhere new; it was just that he could not face up to the pain of going back to Beirut alone.
So she had ended up flying with him, to keep him company. ‘For just a few days until you get settled.’
Two weeks later, she was still in Beirut, visiting the old house in Tel el-Sultan for the first time.
‘It’s ended now.’ Salem stood up and tossed the stone through the grilled opening in the wall. He scuffed the bits of broken tile with his foot. A pile of old clothes caught his eye in the refuse behind the dried up fountain. The parachutist’s smock, shirt and pair of trousers were still lying where Kassim had thrown them, weeks before. Salem picked them up and lifted them to his face. They smelt of old leaves and dust, not a man. He bundled the clothes into a ball and threw it at the grille but it fell short.
‘What a view!’ said Leila, looking at the city and the blue Mediterranean beyond.
Salem was remembering the times when Kassim and he had looked through the telescope with their father to read the neon sign blinking on the seafront: Chakrouty International Hotel. What remained of Beirut now belonged to the future. He smiled at Leila’s excitement in the colours, the smells, the view. In a sleeveless yellow cotton dress and with bare feet she walked about the courtyard, imagining the house as it must have been when it was a home and showering questions on Salem as he pointed out to her the landmarks of the city, or rather where they had been. Her wide-eyed, bubbling enthusiasm made him see Leila as a different woman from the subdued tourist who had viewed with horror the devastation down in the city. At times, Beirut seemed to be peopled by black-clad widows and crippled children hobbling on crutches.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 34